


Too Close for Comfort

by noqueenbutthequeeninthenorth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Adopted Jon Snow, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Pseudo-Incest, Robb is already dead when this starts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:55:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22962754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noqueenbutthequeeninthenorth/pseuds/noqueenbutthequeeninthenorth
Summary: It shouldn’t have meant anything. If it had been Robb, he would’ve wrinkled his nose in disgust or maybe glowered at the thought of his baby sister having sex, but his eyes wouldn’t have gone dark like Jon’s had. His fist wouldn’t have clenched. His gaze wouldn’t have flitted down to her mouth, to her breasts.But Robb had been her true brother.Jon was Jon, and he’d never looked at her the way a brother was supposed to.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 51
Kudos: 246





	1. fucked me so good that I almost said I love you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TacitWhisky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TacitWhisky/gifts).



The first time, he fucks her in her college dorm room one afternoon during Family Weekend while their parents are on a guided tour of Vale University's famously beautiful library.

He’s heavy on top of her, all muscle, and everywhere her hands touch is hard and hot: his broad shoulders, the sweat-damp small of his back, the nape of his neck where she digs her fingernails in because it’s just so good. His breath is fire in her ear, his voice wrecked as he pants a steady stream of _fuck, yes, just like that_ every time she rocks her hips to meet his thrusts.

With a ragged inhale, he draws back just far enough to grasp the hem of her tee-shirt and wrench it up her torso to bare her breasts. _Christ_ , he breathes, looking at her.

There's no time to soak up his admiration because the sudden drag of his rough tongue over the delicate skin of her breast makes her eyes screw shut and her hips buck. His hand cups her other breast, thumb moving in soft, purposeful swipes. It's almost more than she can take, but she doesn’t stop him. Instead she buries her hands in his curls and holds him in place.

_Please, Jon,_ she gasps when he takes her nipple between his teeth, biting just hard enough to send a jolt of arousal down her spine, all the way to her cunt. _Jon, I need to come, I need, oh god, I need —_

Her words dissolve into a moan as his wet mouth closes around her nipple and begins to suck in earnest. Her hips jerk, her back arching off the mattress, as she presses her tits even more insistently into his face.

Maybe that's what does it, or maybe some part of him has registered her pleas, because finally, _finally_ his measured pace gives way to hard, fast thrusts, one of his hands helping to hike her thigh further up his waist so that he can push himself into her so deep that she can hardly breathe. When she grabs his ass for better purchase, he groans against her chest.

_I need to come, let me come_ , she repeats, senseless in her desperation. It’s all she knows. _Jon, please_.

Her nipples are tight and tender beneath his ministrations, so pleasurable it’s almost painful, and as he fucks into her, she can hear the slick of her arousal, so loud she ought to be ashamed. She's not ashamed. She begs him to keep fucking her until she's almost weeping.

At last, his palm presses against her inner thigh, opening her even wider as his thumb circles her aching clit, gentle at first, much too gentle, until she bites his shoulder and the pressure increases, the stroke of his thumb firm and unrelenting. Sloppily, he kisses his way up her chest and finally covers her mouth with his own.

The kiss is like everything else about this moment — fierce and fast and too much to process, and then he pinches her clit just as his cock buries itself deep inside her, and her body bows away from the bed as she clenches around him.

She whines his name, begging for something she can’t find the words for, not anymore. All that’s left inside of her is electricity, desperate to be unleashed. 

But he understands, he must, because he murmurs, _That’s it, sweetheart_ , and rubs her clit in hard circles and tilts his hips just so, touching something deep inside her that makes her hips jerk and her cunt _throb_ , and with his mouth wet against her throat, she comes harder than she’s ever come in her life.

As pleasure shudders through her, she is dimly aware of him fucking into her faster, spreading her even wider as he chases his own orgasm. He grunts, his eyes squeezing closed, and then she feels it, the wetness of his release spilling down her shaking thighs as he pulls out a moment later than he should’ve.

Too soon, he climbs off of her. He won’t meet her eyes as he silently pulls a few tissues from the box on her roommate’s desk and passes them to her. She cleans herself up as best she can before tugging her shirt back down and reaching for her underwear and leggings, which she pulls over her hips.

“I’m gonna use the bathroom,” she tells him, her voice hoarse. “I’ll be right back.” She thinks she sees him nod.

She pees, washes her hands, splashes cold water on her warm face. She’s in the bathroom no more than five minutes.

When she returns to her room, he is gone.

—

By the time her parents come back to her dorm, Sansa has aired out the room, changed the sheets, and showered, but when her father frowns and asks, “Where’s Jon?” it takes her a beat too long before she shrugs and says, “Got bored of hanging out with me, I guess. I think he went to meet his friend. The grad student, the one who goes here.”

Her mother narrows her eyes. “I hope you ate lunch at least.”

“We grabbed sandwiches,” Sansa lies. In fact, they never made it out of the room. Lunch had been the plan, of course. They’d been debating between the official campus deli and the Thai place in the basement of the student union, but _then_ — 

_Then_ she’d teased him about how long his hair had gotten, tugging one perfect curl between her fingers, and he’d stuttered out a shaky breath and, blushing, turned away. That’s when he must’ve spotted the man’s shirt in her hamper and when he looked at her again, his dark eyes flashed, hot with something he didn’t, or couldn’t, hide.

She doesn’t even know how it had gotten there, the large long-sleeved gray henley she’d last seen on Margaery’s Thursday-night hookup. She supposes the boy must’ve made his way home shirtless. She’s pretty sure he lives just down the hall.

But none of that mattered when Jon saw it, when she realized he saw it and she knew what he thought. What felt like minutes later, he broke the thick silence between them. _Who is he?_

_No one._ She licked her lips. _No one special_.

It shouldn’t have meant anything. If it had been Robb, he would’ve wrinkled his nose in disgust or maybe glowered at the thought of his baby sister having sex, but his eyes wouldn’t have gone dark like Jon’s had. His fist wouldn’t have clenched. His gaze wouldn’t have flitted down to her mouth, to her breasts.

But Robb had been her true brother.

Jon was Jon, and he’d never looked at her the way a brother was supposed to.

She supposes she never looked at him the way a sister was supposed to either, because when she should’ve let the moment pass unacknowledged, instead she’d stepped closer, inhaling the scent of his deodorant and his skin, that dizzying and too familiar mix of spice and leather. With a hand against his belly, she could feel his hard abdomen tensing through his shirt. _Sansa_ , he’d growled, a warning.

Her hand slid lower. _I’ve been thinking about this for so long_ , she’d confessed, her lips almost but not quite touching his own, and that was all it took for him to break, to haul her into his arms and kiss her just the way she’s spent too many months imagining he would, deep and frenzied and desperate.

That evening, Sansa takes her parents to dinner at Royce’s, which Yelp says is the best restaurant in the Vale, if not a little overpriced. The reviews didn’t lie: Sansa’s seared salmon is perfectly cooked, and even her notoriously critical mother nods approvingly after a bite of her own orange and fennel roasted cod. Sansa’s father, not especially fond of seafood, orders a steak medium rare.

If Jon were here, Sansa thinks, he’d probably order the lamb. That was always his favorite when they were growing up. But he’s not here. Around five, he’d texted the family group chat to tell them he wouldn’t make it to dinner. _Went to the pub with Sam and lost track of time. I’m crashing at his place tonight._

It’s for the best, even though she suspects it means he won’t be at brunch tomorrow either. After that, he and her parents — _their_ parents — will be packing into the car and beginning the drive back north.

After they’ve finished their main courses, the server deposits three pots of crème brûlée on the table, the apparent must-have dessert at Royce’s, and Sansa’s phone buzzes again. Just her phone. Not the group chat, then. She switches it to silent and digs into her pot with her spoon, cracking through the golden brown layer of hardened sugar to excavate the rich vanilla cream below, and when she licks the spoon, she tries not to think of licking into Jon’s mouth earlier that afternoon, the taste of him somehow even sweeter than dessert.

Only after her parents have dropped her off again at her dorm does she look at the slew of messages waiting for her, each sending her heart sinking further and further into her stomach. Whatever easiness he’d managed in his texts to the whole family has vanished. His desperation, his regret, practically spill through her screen.

_I fucked up. I am so sorry. Robb would kill me and I deserve it._

Eleven minutes later, he’d sent another message. _Tell me if you need to take something. I can get it or I can venmo you or whatever you want._ And then, another minute later, a clarification: _Like plan b or anything else you need_.

In the dorm room, Margaery’s sitting up in bed watching HGTV on her laptop. Probably one of those home renovation shows she’s addicted to. She lifts a hand to wave but doesn’t pull out her earbuds, so Sansa just smiles and slips out of her shoes before crawling into her own bed. The bed where Jon fucked her. Without a condom. Jesus.

Taking a deep breath, she opens her phone and begins to type. She owes him an answer for some of it at least.

_Don’t worry, I have an IUD. And I’m clean_

She’d gotten tested after breaking up with Harry three months earlier. She’d never fucked _him_ without a condom, thank god, given that he’d apparently been sleeping around behind her back ever since they began dating the summer after her first year.

Jon’s response comes faster than she expects. _Me too. I haven’t been with anyone in a while._

_Neither have I_. She could leave it there, but instead she types one more sentence, her thumb hesitating momentarily over the ‘send’ arrow before she makes herself press it. _The shirt belonged to someone Margaery’s seeing_.

Three dots appear, disappear, reappear. Finally, he sends one last message.

_Can we pretend this never happened?_

She doesn’t know what she expected. 

She types out her reply but doesn’t press send, staring at the words she’s written, weighing them. _We can try_. That’s not what he wants to hear. Sighing, she deletes the words and types a new response, already knowing it’s a lie.

_Of course._


	2. if you hold me without hurting me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa is five when Jon Snow comes to live with them. He’s a short, sullen boy about Robb’s age, with a mop of dark curls and sad brown eyes, and according to her parents, he is supposed to be her brother now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is all backstory (everything takes place before the events of Chapter 1), but never fear, we'll be back to your regularly-scheduled smut in the next chapter.

Sansa is five when Jon Snow comes to live with them. He’s a short, sullen boy about Robb’s age, with a mop of dark curls and sad brown eyes, and according to her parents, he is supposed to be her brother now.

When she asks why, her father says that Jon’s mum was in an accident and died. Her mother purses her lips and says, more gently, that Jon lost the person most important to him in the world and now he needs new people to look after him. It’s sad that Jon’s mum died, and sadder still when he arrives in Winterfell with a single duffle bag and a cast on his arm, and Sansa overhears her mother on the phone saying that Jon had been in the car with his mother when it crashed and killed her.

Still, it is unclear to Sansa why, if it is true that Jon needs people to care for him, that those people must be her parents, but when Robb asks Father where Jon’s dad is, he is sternly told that it is bad behavior to pry into matters that do not concern him, so Sansa holds her tongue. She is a good girl. She will not ask questions. She will not complain.

Arya is the first to adopt Jon as a brother, and as time passes, Sansa begins to suspect that Arya doesn’t recall a time when Jon wasn’t there. Of course to Bran and Rickon, the babies, Jon has always been their brother. It takes Robb a little longer to accept him, but by Sansa’s sixth birthday, the boys are thick as thieves, and Robb spends more time at her party playing with Jon than he does paying attention to her.

The years pass and Jon is there, always, on holidays and vacations, walking with her and Robb up the stairs of Winterfell Elementary, playing video games on the couch with Arya. Every Thursday for five years, Sansa and Jon sit side by side in the backseat of the Stark’s slate gray SUV on their way home from their respective extracurriculars: ballet for her, soccer for him. Robb, who is captain of the soccer team, rides up in the front seat, claiming it is his right as the oldest. Usually all of them are sweaty and tired, too busy munching on handfuls of almonds or fruit snacks and gulping down water from their water bottles to make conversation. Sometimes, if the A/C is running too high, Sansa gets cold in her leotard, and when that happens, Jon hands her his balled-up windbreaker to lay across her lap like a blanket.

Sometimes her mum puts on the oldies radio station and Sansa sings along to the Beach Boys and Tony Bennett and Nina Simone, and if she feels Jon’s eyes on her, dark, intent, she ignores it. She doesn’t blush. Her cheeks are flushed from dance practice, that’s all. That’s all.

—

She’s eleven when she leaves Winterfell for a boarding school in King’s Landing, and by the time she returns, fifteen years old with all her fairytale dreams beaten out of her, Jon is at the military academy up north where her uncle Benjen works. 

She sees him once before he graduates, over the Christmas holiday, but he speaks no more than a handful of words to her. It doesn’t matter. He’s never been her brother, whatever anyone else may say, no matter how he may call her father Dad.

(He doesn’t call Catelyn Stark his mother, at least. His real mum must be too vivid in his memory. When he first came to live with the Starks, he called Catelyn “ma’am,” stiff, quiet, always sounding a little terrified of her. Somewhere along the way ma’am became Mam, that long vowel notable only because it differs so obviously from how the rest of the them refer to her. They call her Mum.)

The morning Jon drives back to Wall Academy, Sansa lines up in the entryway alongside her siblings to wish him goodbye with a smile and a hug, but when his large hand touches the small of her back, firm and warmer than she expected, she startles in his embrace, a infinitesimal stiffening that only he notices. He releases her instantly.

A moment later, he shoulders his duffel bag and steps through the door. “Bye,” he says, his voice low and clipped.

Arya bounces on the balls of her feet. “I’ll walk you to your truck!” It’s not an offer so much as a desperate plea, but Jon must allow it because she scurries after him, still wearing her house slippers. She and Robb and Rickon follow them out onto the porch, huddling together in the January wind, and though Sansa lifts her hand to wave goodbye to Jon, her gaze remains fixed on his scuffed brown boots and the crisp impressions they leave in the snow. She doesn’t meet his eyes.

— 

Sansa is a freshman at Vale University when the call comes, a jumble of words that gut her just in the hearing of them: _accident, emergency, hospital, bleeding, couldn’t save him. Robb._ After that, nothing makes sense anymore.

Without hesitation, Sansa packs a bag and throws it into the back seat of her car, the same gray SUV her mother used to drive, and then she drives twelve hours to Winterfell, stopping only to pee and buy more coffee. She doesn’t think. She doesn’t cry. All she does is drive, the yellow of her headlights flooding the highway as the hours tick on, later and later. It’s dawn when she finally pulls up to the house. 

Jon is standing in the driveway, leaning against the side of his pickup truck, and as he turns to look at her, he takes a long drag from a cigarette before throwing it down and stepping on it, crushing the orange ember beneath his boot.

She unbuckles her seatbelt, climbs out of the car. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I’m trying to quit.”

She watches him, taking in the fitted jeans and black crew-neck sweatshirt embossed with the crow symbol of the Night’s Warch, the elite military group he'd joined after graduating from Wall. Surely he must not be warm enough.

“What are you doing out here?” she asks.

He lifts a shoulder, then drops it, a careless shrug that doesn’t quite match the intensity of his gaze as it searches her face. “I was waiting for you.”

He says it so simply it makes her ache, and the only response she can find is his name, the softest _Jon_ she’s ever spoken, so soft it is a wonder he hears it, but he must because the sound of it seems to cut through him like steel. The stoic facade he’d been maintaining crumbles in an instant and all at once she is reminded of the little boy who’d come to Winterfell more than a decade ago, his arm in a cast, his heart broken. 

“Jesus, Sansa, he’s — ” He can’t say it.

She doesn’t know who takes the first step, who is the first to reach out, but it hardly matters — like that, they are in each other’s arms, holding each other so tightly it almost hurts, and whatever thread of control that had been holding Sansa together until now snaps. She presses her face into his shoulder and sobs, sudden and ugly and wet, before Jon lifts one hand to cup the back of her head and uses the other to pull her even closer by the waist, so that when she inhales, all she can smell is him, the acrid musk of cigarette smoke alongside the familiar spice of his deodorant.

She cries until her throat is raw and her lips are dry, and he doesn’t let go.

Later, after she’s dried her face on her sleeve and gone inside to face her weeping mother and the boys, uncharacteristically quiet, after her father drops a kiss on her forehead and Arya glares at her with reddened eyes, after she's gone to her pink childhood bedroom and crawled into her pink childhood bed, she can still smell Jon on her hair, on her skin, the smallest of comforts as she stares up at the ceiling, trying to sleep, trying to convince herself that her brother is dead.

—

The funeral is at once endless and a blur, full of interactions Sansa doesn’t comprehend, gentle comments, gentle touches from any number of friends and strangers. A clasped shoulder. A brief hug. A handshake. There is a eulogy, delivered by Bran, that leaves half the church wildly weeping, a noisy outburst that Sansa cannot help but resent. As if the grief they feel can even begin to compare to what they, Robb’s _family_ , are experiencing. It’s an uncharitable thought, Sansa knows. She thinks it anyway.

When it is Sansa’s turn to speak, however, her eyes are dry and her voice is even, and all the teary faces in the audience shame her. She should be crying too, but she hasn’t cried since the previous morning, when she was in Jon’s arms. Since then, she has been too busy — helping arrange the funeral, looking after Rickon, making excruciating phone calls to people who hadn’t heard the news yet. She hasn’t had time for tears. She thought they would come today.

She stands at the front of the church and reads a poem she’d been assigned in her Intro to English Lit class, and even at the time it had reminded her of Robb, of his remarkable capacity for joy, his dogged optimism. Yet speaking the words now, they taste like lies on her tongue: “We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left.”

 _It does not feel_ , Sansa thinks, looking down at her devastated mother and her stern father, at her younger siblings, all of them looking utterly lost, _that life has any possibility left_.

After the service is over, Sansa says she’s going to the bathroom and disappears outside instead, pushing out the back entrance into a service alley and gasping great, cold lungfuls of air as if she’s been holding her breath for hours. Days. She drops to her haunches, crouching against the stone wall with her hands on her knees, and she counts to ten, twenty, fifty. At one hundred, she blows out a stream of air and straightens.

Only to find Jon is standing there, watching her, an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear.

Embarrassment doesn’t come. Neither does the urge she’s felt every minute of every hour since the moment she stepped through the door and greeted her family, the urge to pretend that she is stronger than she is, that she can handle this, that she can make things better, somehow.

Instead, Sansa lifts her chin and nods at the cigarette. “You really should quit.”

“I know.” He offers her one of his strange, sad smiles. “Are you … ?”

“No,” she says. “Fresh air helps though.”

“I liked your poem.”

“Mary Oliver,” she tells him, pointlessly. “I don’t know why I read it. God knows Robb never heard of her. He didn’t care about poetry. He wouldn’t have wanted — ”

Jon hazards a step toward her. “He would’ve loved it.” Pulling the cigarette out from behind his ear, he fidgets with it, rolling it between his fingers, which look chapped and pink in the cold air. “Besides, at least you said _something_. I … I didn’t know what to say.” He shakes his head, his free hand reaching up to tug on his hair before he seems to remember it’s tied back. He makes a fist at his side instead. “I still don’t know what to say. What the fuck am I supposed to say?”

It’s a question without an answer, the way Robb’s death is a mistake that cannot be fixed. There is no making it better. It’s an ugly wound in the world, a bloody gash that will never heal.

“You can smoke it, if you want. I won’t complain.”

A surprised glance down at the cigarette, two dark eyebrows lifting, and then the flicker of a smile. “I’ll quit tomorrow.” He digs a lighter out from his dark wool coat. He’s left it open, so she can see that his fine black tie has been loosened, his crisp white shirt unbuttoned at the collar.

She averts her eyes. 

There’s the _snick_ of the lighter, then the quiet but unmistakable inhale as Jon takes a drag. In the ensuing silence, the smell of the cigarette wafts toward her and she wrinkles her nose, but she told him it was okay. She won’t begrudge him this comfort, not today.

After several long moments, she says, “I can’t stay at Vale.”

“What?” His sharp tone makes her look up to see his furrowed brow. The hand holding his cigarette hangs in the air, halfway to his mouth. “Why not?”

It’s something she’s been thinking about all day, ever since she woke from fitful sleep near dawn and instead of rolling over and trying to get another hour or two in, she rose in the gray light, pulled on her bathrobe, and made her way downstairs. By seven, she’d cooked breakfast, swept the floors, cleaned out the refrigerator, and dusted the living room. By eight, she’d woken Rickon and made him take a bath, then helped him with his suit, and when Arya came downstairs with a toothpaste stain on her top, Sansa had dug out a black blouse from the back of her closet. When her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, the circles dark under her eyes and her dress making her skin look sallow, Sansa had presented her with a cup of tea and the assurance that everyone would be ready to leave by nine.

“I’m the oldest now,” she tells Jon. “I have to take care of the kids. Somebody has to. I know it should be Mum, but she’s … ” Sansa shakes her head. “I’m really worried about her, Jon. And you know Dad isn’t good with feelings, and Arya is going to be a nightmare from now on, and Rickon, god, Rickon is so young. And Bran, I know he wants to apply to Weirwood Academy for high school and he won’t make the grades if he’s the one who ends up managing things at home. I can’t be so far away. I’m the oldest now. They need me.”

He frowns at her, not seeming to notice the long column of silver ash at the tip of his cigarette. “ _I’m_ the oldest now.”

Heat floods her cheeks. “I know. I didn’t mean — I only meant — ”

“I know what you meant.” Realizing that his cigarette is burning low, threatening to burn his fingers, he drops it into the gravel with a hiss. “Look, I get it. It’s all right. But I am the oldest now, and if anyone is going to help out at home, it should be me.”

“But what about the Watch?”

She hasn’t spoken to him much about his service, or why he’d chosen it, except that, like Wall, it had been recommended by Uncle Benjen. She doesn’t know if he likes his company, if he’s bonded with his brothers in arms. Yet she knows without being told that he is good at what he does. She simply cannot imagine anything else.

He just shrugs and says, “My three years are done in a couple months. I won’t re-up.”

“But — ”

“It’s fine, Sansa. Really.” The corner of his mouth quirks, an attempt to reassure her. “ I’ll come home. I’ll look after the kids. You worked hard to get into Vale.”

Her studying, her tests, her frantic prayers when the letter from Vale came, it had all been so acute at the time, but none of it matters anymore.

She shakes her head. “Robb — ”

“Robb would want you to go back to school.” He watches her a moment, gaze unbearably soft, and then asks, “Do you not want to go back?”

“I don’t know what I want,” she admits. “I don’t know how to do this. How to feel like this. I never thought something like this could happen.”

A slow nod, his eyes cast down at the gravel. Then, in a voice like smoke, “I never thought it would happen again.”

Sansa’s stomach sinks, realization setting in. _Oh god_. “Oh, Jon, your mother … ” She reaches for him, but he flinches away.

“A car accident. _Again_. It’s like a cruel fucking joke.”

She steps closer again, and this time he stays put, letting her lift a hand to his check, letting her thumb wipe away a tear as it falls. “I’m so sorry, Jon.” She embraces him then, holding on for what feels like forever, long enough for him to begin to relax into the touch, his hand stroking softly down her back, coming to rest on her waist. When she finally releases her hold, she finds she is still connected to him at the one warm point, the heat of his hand seeping through her dress, and she can’t help but meet his eyes, those dark eyes that promise danger and softness in equal measures, tears clinging to his black eyelashes. His breath fans across her lips, still a little cigarette-sour, but not unpleasant. His hand tightens on her waist.

She inhales sharply and her gaze drops to his mouth.

“Sansa!” a voice calls out.

Jon rips his hand away from Sansa and stumbles backward, his breath coming in heavy pants. She’s not much better, her heart hammering wildly in her chest.

“There you are.” It’s Bran, who rolls toward them through the open doorway of the back exit, looking much too grown up in his black suit and black tie. “I’ve been looking for you both. Uncle Benjen gave Mum and Rickon a ride home, but Dad’s going to take the rest of us back to the house for the wake. Are you ready to go?”

“Yes,” Sansa says quickly. “Yes, let’s go.”

They bundle into their father’s car, Jon up front, Sansa squeezed in between Bran and Arya. Bran is somber, but Arya is sullen, all bunched in on herself, as she has been ever since Sansa came home. Probably ever since she found out about Robb. In the rearview mirror Sansa can see her father’s face reflected, too pale and with more lines than it used to have, his beard strangely dark against his waxy skin. He looks older than he is.

At one point, Jon glances over his shoulder at her, something unreadable in his expression, and he avoids her for the rest of the day.

—

The wake, like the funeral, draws more soft touches, more earnest condolences, but Sansa does a better job of absorbing them this time, smiling and nodding and saying _thank you_ at all the right moments. 

She accepts a hug from her professor, Dr. Baelish, who has come to town for the funeral. He is an old friend of her mother’s and teaches Sansa’s polisci class, and he’s already promised to give her an extension on the midterm. He tells her that if she needs to arrange accommodations for the rest of the semester — or if she might wish to take an incomplete — she should come to his office hours as soon as possible. “I want to help you, Sansa. Anything you need, anything at all, just let me know.”

Her uncles Benjen and Edmure kiss her cheek and squeeze her hand, and Grandpa Hoster, who sometimes confuses her with her mother, offers to cut her a slice of cake. Jeyne Poole, Sansa’s childhood best friend, comes to her with tear-stained cheeks and sincere sorrow, and it is she who tells Sansa that Theon Greyjoy, Robb’s best friend, likely won’t put in an appearance. According to Jeyne, he’s probably getting hammered somewhere and, really, it’s for the best he’s not around. He’d just make a scene. 

(Sansa envies Theon a little, that he can simply not be here. That when he is upset, he can make scenes. That he is allowed to fall apart.)

Every hour or so, Sansa brings her mother a hot cup of chamomile, taking the previous hour’s tepid half-full mug to the kitchen and dumping it down the drain. Watching the pale yellow tea swirl in the porcelain skin for a moment before disappearing, Sansa tries not to think about her return to university, even though she knows Jon is right, that more than anything Robb would want her to stick it out and complete her education. She should want that too, but part of her thinks she would be content bringing her mother tea every day for the rest of her life, if she thought it might soothe the pain even a little.

A voice interrupts her thoughts. “How are you holding up?”

She turns from the sink to see her father in the doorway, watching her with a degree of attention she is not accustomed to. He hasn’t overlooked her in the past, not precisely, but she’s always been the good child, the one no one felt they needed to worry about, and for years she’s felt his gaze slide off her, unconcerned. She’s never let him do otherwise. She never told him about King’s Landing or Joffrey. She hadn’t wanted to disappoint him.

Now, however, he’s frowning, his worry apparent, plain on his face. 

“I’m holding up,” she answers at last. It’s all she can think to say.

“Do you need anything?”

“No, thanks, Dad. I’m doing all right.” 

Something in the words must not convince him, because he frowns and edges closer, the line between his eyebrows a clear sign that he’s still thinking. That he won’t just nod and move on. When he speaks, however, it is not to press her, not to ask any questions — it is only to say, “We’ll be okay.” A pause as his long face hardens, a familiar determination in his features. “The Starks endure, we always have. This … god knows this isn’t something you can ever be prepared for, but we’re still a family. It’s going to be hard, but I promise, we’ll be okay.”

She crosses to the stove, not knowing what to say, and sets the kettle to boil. At her back, her father continues, “You know, my brother died when I was about your age.”

“Uncle Brandon.” She glances over her shoulder at him. “I forgot.”

“It was different. He was sick.” His voice thickens, the words coming slow and harsh. “It’s wrong, for anyone to be taken so young. Robb — ” He chokes. “It will feel impossible for a long time. We’ll never stop missing him. But we will make it through this. You will. I promise.”

She wants to believe him, but as she waits for the kettle to boil, she cannot help but think that he has left something unsaid, something important. She thinks of the heat in Jon’s eyes, the way she let him hold her and how it shouldn’t matter, how he’s supposed to be her brother. She thinks of his breath on her face in the alley behind the church. She thinks about how, somehow, with Robb dead, all the rules she’s always lived by no longer seem to matter.

Maybe she will make it through this, maybe she will survive — but what will she become to do it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Sansa reads is Mary Oliver's "Don't Hesitate."
> 
> The chapter title comes from Lana del Rey's "Cinnamon Girl." The full lyric is "if you hold me without hurting me, you'll be the first who ever did."

**Author's Note:**

> This was very loosely inspired by listening to Lana del Rey's newest album (and all chapter titles come from LDR songs). There's not much plot to this one and don't expect frequent updates, but this has been fun to work on in between my other WIPs.


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